Being engulfed in the music you're listening to is one of the greatest joys of the entire medium but when you don't want to annoy everyone with your newest extreme screaming madness sometimes you have to resort to headphones (or perhaps that's your preferred method in general). This is where what sounds like great, perfectly crafted music through those high quality external speakers suddenly shows its faults; sometimes to the point of ruining the experience entirely.

Let me share the biggest, most glaring pet peeve I have: the vocals or some specific instrument being balanced to be mostly (or entirely) in one headphone or the other (but normally the left one). For a while I was questioning whether there was some psychological reason for this, like maybe the voice being louder in one side meant it would hit the verbal side of the brain more effectively or something but I think we all know the real culprit. It's a failure of the person mixing the music who somehow completely overlooks (overlistens!?) this fairly glaring error.

It's clearly a mistake when the entire album is properly mixed up until one song where suddenly the vocals are all on one side, completely pulling you out of the experience. I used to tough my way through this issue though, even when it was an entire album suffering from this problem, because I believed it was intentional by the artists making the music. I'm pretty sure my hearing in one ear is worse than the other specifically because of this as often there is another issue that ends up paired with it: whatever is only coming out of one headphone tends to also be louder than everything else which means to hear everything else properly you need to turn up the volume to the point that the improperly mixed bit is now obliterating the ear it's in.

What are your biggest pet peeves? I'll definitely be interested in reading them and maybe this will help give a heads up to artists about what to keep an ear out for.

Great topic.

Lack of bass in the mix pisses me off, even in most Black Metal.

When the bass is louder than the guitar. Not even the guitar being louder than the bass bugs me as much, because sometimes less bass is fine.

Omg I developed a phobia of this thing of separating instrument(s) on left/right channel. Back on the 90s I used to listen to music on a stereo because disc mans were pretty expensive. But it turns out my stereo was more like a mono. So I actually only listened to music on one side and if I wanted to listen to the whole thing I needed to find the exact spot for the cable and don't shake the surface at any degree, otherwise it would turn into mono again.

So every time a song/album had the instruments separated on the two channels it all sounded like shit. So yeah...

Written by Karlabos on 18.05.2018 at 18:26

Omg I developed a phobia of this thing of separating instrument(s) on left/right channel. Back on the 90s I used to listen to music on a stereo because disc mans were pretty expensive. But it turns out my stereo was more like a mono. So I actually only listened to music on one side and if I wanted to listen to the whole thing I needed to find the exact spot for the cable and don't shake the surface at any degree, otherwise it would turn into mono again.

So every time a song/album had the instruments separated on the two channels it all sounded like shit. So yeah...

Yeah that is actually pretty annoying, unless it's one quick part of a song.

Written by Guest on 18.05.2018 at 19:21

Written by Karlabos on 18.05.2018 at 18:26

Omg I developed a phobia of this thing of separating instrument(s) on left/right channel. Back on the 90s I used to listen to music on a stereo because disc mans were pretty expensive. But it turns out my stereo was more like a mono. So I actually only listened to music on one side and if I wanted to listen to the whole thing I needed to find the exact spot for the cable and don't shake the surface at any degree, otherwise it would turn into mono again.

So every time a song/album had the instruments separated on the two channels it all sounded like shit. So yeah...

Yeah that is actually pretty annoying, unless it's one quick part of a song.

Agreed. If they do something later in the song that balances it out, like a brief sound only in the other channel, then it's even better but when everything happens on the same side it's seriously aggravating.